The last month has been a bit busy with the kickoff of the holiday season! I was able to get back to Wisconsin for 6 days which was nice. I got to see my family, some friends and hang out in the woods with my dad so those were all good things. Then when I got back to Michigan I did Thanksgiving with Matt's family and then worked in a mall on black Friday for the first time. I have to say, it wasn't as terrible as I expected! Surprising but true. Only one customer was angry enough to make a co-worker cry so that's a plus. I didn't have to work until 2 in the afternoon which also helped I think. Funny enough working that Saturday was actually worse than working black Friday. Maybe I was just so worn out from Friday. Who knows. Since then I've been working a little less and have been trying any means possible to get a job!
Clearly I still don't have a full time job-but I'm still working on it! I've been trying to use any tiny, barely there connection I can to get my foot in the door somewhere (so far, to no avail but I'm going to keep trying). I also graduated from my mentorship program on Wednesday so that was nice. I'll still stay in touch with my mentor and I've kept all of the materials I got through the program and I think they'll really be of use when I get a position. I've also agreed to take an unpaid internship at Gilda's Club as a grant writer. I've done some research/reading on grant writing but haven't got any practical experience so it will be a nice way for me to gain a new skill. So that's where I'm at with the job hunt-not a whole lot new to report there.
Now for fun stuff-Christmas trees and pictures! In our house Christmas is a big deal-Matt LOVES Christmas! I can only imagine how much more ridiculous it is going to get once we have kids. We had our Christmas tree up on Thanksgiving night and we were all decorated within a week! I've posted some pictures below of our tree and how we moved things around in the living room a bit and added in some Christmas decorations. I've also got pictures of our 2 bedrooms and kitchen....you know the ones I said I'd post about 5 months ago! Finally got there! We just re-arranged our kitchen a bit and bought a new shelf thingy to open it up a bit more and give us more storage (something our kitchen is sorely lacking). The spare room has been pretty well set up for a while but I recently did a total re-organization of all of the closets in our house so I was able to fit more into the closet in the spare room so it looks a bit better now. Both bedrooms are still pretty sparse but they're totally functioning spaces which is all we really require of them at the moment. The pictures aren't of the best quality(I just took them with my phone) but they're pictures! Enjoy.....
Christmas tree all decorated. I made the the thing on the wall next to it. A super cute towel stretched over a wooden frame :)
Christmas tree all lit up!
We only had to move a couple of things to get the tree up and some decorations out. At first Matt wasn't sure he would like it but I think we've both gotten used to the new arrangement.
I've loved having all of the pine tree smelling candles out like the one on top of this shelf. We had fun adding decorations to things we already had out. For instance the two snowflake guys on one of the shelves and the ornaments leaning up against the figurine and camera. Just fun touches that don't require a whole lot of effort :)
I've been adding little festive things to this planter on our front porch. I really wanted to have a Christmas thing in there now and was about to go to Home Depot and buy one of their pine decor things when I realized....hey I can just make something! So I used some branches from the tree in our front yard and some random decorations my Grandma gave us and...voila. Matt even noticed it without me telling him I did it!
Our bedroom with a patio door going out to our deck and back yard. This patio door is totally backwards. Instead of having the glass door on the inside the screen is on the inside! It's one of the more annoying things about this house. Makes it kind of hard to leave the door open on nice cool spring/summer/fall nights. Oh well-I guess it doesn't really matter now that it's winter.
The other side of the view from the bedroom door :) This is the most decorated part of our bedroom.
Like I said....our bedroom is pretty sparse but totally functioning. Although, I am looking forward to being able to get an actual bed frame-complete with headboard and footboard. Eventually we'll get there :)
Here's our spare room. Or as we call it-Pablo's room. I have a large penguin stuffed animal that Matt named Pablo. So he get's his own room. This room is pretty small. When the futon is folded out there's just enough room to move around. Believe it or not, this is where we had our bedroom for the first 2 weeks of living here. Not the best fit ever when you add in all the boxes and clothes we also had to keep in here at the same time. I do not miss those days!
Here's the other side of the room. Again-small but it works.
The view from the corner of the room looking out. As I said-this room is also pretty sparse but we'll eventually get to putting things on the big empty wall :) We just haven't gotten there or figured out what we want yet.
On to the kitchen! View of the kitchen from the doorway leading to the living room/rest of the house. The lovely yellow/orange door is the color that all of the walls in the spare room used to be....now you see why we painted :) It's a decent sized kitchen that lacks storage space (we have exactly two drawers...I kid you not). Since we only had one day to find a place to live and almost everything else we saw was so bad we were thrilled when we saw this kitchen. Only after we moved in did I realize how much less storage it had than our previous kitchen. We dealt with it and got nice and creative with our storage :)
Here's the new shelf we just got. I like the openness of it-it doesn't really block out much light from the window which is great. We didn't overload the shelves with stuff but it's amazing how much moving just a few key things out of cupboards or off of counter tops can make a big difference.
The bar cart thing was one of my better Craigslist finds in Madison. So glad we were able to bring it with us.
This is the view from the corner by the shelf. We do have a great gas stove which we love. The wood counter tops are cool-just not super taken care of. It's defintely something I would consider in a house some day so I'm glad we've gotten to try them out here.
Well that's about it for the tour of our house. We do have lots of Christmas lights up in the living room and we even bought some solar lights for outside (no outdoor outlets in this house). I'll try and get some pictures of those soon.
